The use of cameras by public safety officers to record specifics of accident and crime scenes can facilitate accurate record keeping. The video can be used to objectively determine actual circumstances of critical events such as officer-involved shootings and to investigate allegations of police brutality or other crimes/criminal intent. A common use case entails an officer responding to a call by approaching the scene in their official vehicle having mounted cameras for video capture.
Whether or not the recorded “evidence” is used solely for investigative purposes (e.g., to internally clear an officer of wrongdoing or to focus a forensic investigation) or for actual court-admissible prosecution or defense, it is important to be able to determine with reasonably high assurance whether or not the video has been tainted. It is also important to be able to do this without incurring inordinate equipment and/or operations expenses that negate the benefits. Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for providing and determining integrity of video.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.